Period doubling
My dissertation investigates how sub-phonemic differences in voice contribute to tone contrasts in Mandarin Chinese by focusing on period-doubled voice and its role in pitch and tone perception.
What is period doubling?
Period doubling is one of the most common types of creaky voice, (~25% in normal speakers’ utterances; Klatt & Klatt, 1990), for example, the creaky voice in Mandarin Tone 3 is often realized as period doubling. Despite so, it is better known from studies of pathological voice and singing styles as “diplophonic voice” (Gerratt et al., 1988; Bailly et al., 2010 among others): diplophonia, dysphonia, throat singing in Mongolian folk music, Tibetan chants, Sardinian, and Japanese traditional singing.
It consists of two simultaneous harmonics of different frequencies, and often results in bitonal and rough voice sounding (Redi & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2001; Keating et al., 2015). Given the presence of multiple f0s, the pitch during period doubling is often indeterminate, and so it is unclear whether tone is identifiable in period doubling.
How is period doubling produced?
Questions asked and answered in the first study:
1) What are the articulatory and acoustic properties of period doubling in Mandarin compared to those of vocal fry and modal voice?
2) Where in the tones and phrases is period doubling located with regard to vocal fry, and modal voice?
The major novel findings are presented and published in Speech Prosody 2022 @ Lisbon, May 22-28, 2022:
Huang, Y. (2022). Articulatory properties of period-doubled voice in Mandarin. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 545-549. doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-111
A following talk highlights the linguistic distributions of period doubling and vocal fry:
Huang, Y. (2023). Tonal and phrasal distributions of sub-phonemic creaky voice in Mandarin. HISPhonCog 2023. Seoul, Korea. link
How is period doubling perceived?
Questions asked and answered in the second study:
1) How do people perceive and produce period-doubled voice with different modulation types and varying degrees of modulation?
2) How does period doubling affect linguistic tone perception and production?
3) Do speakers of tonal vs. non-tonal languages behave differently?
A more complete version of the findings is presented and published at ICPhS 2023 in Prague, 10.8 Speech Perception 4:
Huang, Y. (2023). Perception and imitation of period doubling. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Prague, Czech Republic. pp. 327-331. link
Earlier findings are presented at ASA Nashville Meeting Fall 2022 in session 3aSC Speech Perception:
Huang, Y. (2022). Low tone bias during perception of period doubling. J Acoust Soc Am 152 (4_Supplement): A172. doi: 10.1121/10.0015927
How important are source and filter characteristics in distinguishing between creaky and modal voice and within creaky voice?
Exploratory data analysis and two ML approaches were used to assess the importance of source and filter characteristics represented by acoustic and EGG measures in distinguishing between period doubling, vocal fry, and modal voice.
The major findings are presented and published in 13th International Seminar on Speech Production @ Autrans, France, May 13-17, 2024:
Huang, Y. (2024). Exploration and classification of vocal fry, period doubling, and modal voice using acoustic and EGG measures. Proc. ISSP 2024 - 13th International Seminar on Speech Production, 140-143. doi: 10.21437/issp.2024-36
What is the role of phonetic details of creaky voice in tonal representation?
This work explores how naturally-occurring subtypes of creak such as period doubling and vocal fry affect tone perception in terms of naturalness. Compared to a categorization task, the use of naturalness ratings allows for capturing more gradient aspects in the linguistic functions of fine-grained phonetic details of creak.
The major findings are presented and published in the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology: LabPhon 19 @ Seoul, Korea, June 27-29, 2024 and Speech Prosody 2024 @ Leiden, The Netherlands, July 2-5, 2024: